ABSTRACT
Twice in the nineteenth century, Galicia – the largest Austrian crownland – was hit by major outbreaks of violence; in 1846 and again in 1898, several thousand Roman Catholic peasants launched concerted attacks on members of antagonistic social or religious groups. The chapter examines the role of religious ideas and clerical mobilization strategies in precipitating and steering these attacks and in shaping their popular perception. It considers the continuities and rifts in relations between lay Catholics and ecclesiastical actors in the nineteenth century and explores how both groups participated in constructing images of enemies of ‘the Catholic people’. The chapter proposes that even though the clergy was a major influence on both waves – urging Catholics to renounce alcohol in 1846 and to boycott Jewish shops in 1898 – the violence is better understood as an expression of peasant self-empowerment justified in rational and religious terms. The increasingly antisemitic thrust of peasant aggression was symptomatic of the growing entanglement of politics and religion, shifting the popular definition of otherness from one based on religious difference to one based on ethnic and national criteria. In sum, these collective orgies of violence advanced the politicization of the Galician peasantry in the late nineteenth century.
